When the owner of a music studio spouts out one of the best lines of the year from a film, you know you are in a good place – and so it is with the musical comedy drama THE INCOHERENTS.
Generation X seems a long way away – and what exactly did the generation achieve? Well, they all petered out and found real-life and – as the title of a mid-90s Ben Stiller / Winona Ryder film proclaimed – reality bites. However, pangs of ambition still remain for a group of old 90s misfits who formed the backbone of ‘The Incoherents’, a band that had a Warhol moment when they played a small gig alongside Jeff Buckley.
It is clear the on-set of time, coupled with the off-set of ambition, have not dampened any of the members’ enthusiasm for the art of live performance and despite having a variety of day jobs to keep them going, coupled with families and wives who may have an ambition or two to re-pursue in their own lives, they decide to make it happen once again.
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However, the band’s desire to reclaim their moment in the limelight, coupled with what it may or may not mean to them presently, begins to play on their mind-set, as well as the band sets…
Fans of Walter Hill’s 48 HRS (1982) and SUPERMAN III (1983) will enjoy Annette O’Toole as the aforementioned studio owner, Mrs. Graham, who seems a little more spaced out here than she was as Nick Nolte’s squeeze or the adult Lana Lang respectively, but it adds to the charm of an engaging tale or re-engagement with lost ambitions and dreams for a bunch of people who clearly are trying to reinvent their own wheel when it comes to going for the so-called ‘Big Dream’
Keeping its focus to the small-gig ideal rather than the style of a band out for more on the big-stage, THE INCOHERENTS keeps it real with a likeable bunch of performances whilst maintaining a sense of perspective of how things have changed creatively for music in terms of performance and presentation.
Although the context is limited to the MTV 90s generation, anyone who loves the joy of live music and rocking it real will identify with the dilemmas and discourse that the participants get up to.
THE INCOHERENTS takes an age-old cliché of musical cinema, but flips it to give it the right blend of comic and dramatic edge.
